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Comment by consteval | Hacker News Reader

> All that will happen is new ad placements from smaller companies, directly in the browser.

I don't think this is going to be the case. This seems like an extreme conclusion with virtually no precedent.

Since an ad browser is such an important piece of software, I imagine it will receive many donations. The reason Chrome doesn't is because it doesn't need them. I think that will change.

Also, I think it's possible you will pay for a browser at some point. Ultimately software costs money to make and we've become desensitized to that because we've exchanged that cost for advertising. But advertising sucks. For example, I pay double for HBO Max just so I don't see ads, and I'm not alone in that.

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The precedent is that every browser out there currently has one of:

- integration to ad infrastructure

- integration to the vendor's other service infrastructure

- a cost of more than $0

Given that the market is full of people who will only bear $0, the likely conclusion is that a Chrome separated from the ability to integrate to vendor infrastructure will turn to integrating to someone's ad infrastructure (more poorly and less securely than Chrome currently integrates to Google's infra).

No one pays $0. All that slurping of user data is used by other corps to maximize their profits.

They're paying for that data, and then believe they're making more from consumers as a result. But no matter what, the cost of collecting that data, the infra, and then corp x or y buying it, comes out of the bottom line.

It's like points credit cards. Where does that cash back come from, magical fairies? It comes from retailers' bottom lines, eg from you.

well, I know that the free cash I get IS from fairies. Yours doesn't?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Looking at your current user's post history, you've posted gibberish as comments (just random text). You then progressed to posting a personal history multiple times, where you lambasted the users of this forum, essentially calling everyone "mean" and implying foul intent. Attacks like this are against the guidelines, and really, I cannot imagine they'd go over well anywhere.

Most of your posts seem to be non-thoughtful posts (see the guidelines), which contribute little such as this one. We all go off the rails a bit from time to time, we all colour outside the lines occasionally, but it seems like most of your posts are outside of the lines.

If you really want to engage in thoughtful debate, at least on HN, I suggest you read the guidelines again, and at least attempt to post in the spirit much of the time. Again, no one is going to be perfect in this, but from what I see it doesn't seem like you really want to engage thoughtfully.

Good luck.

But there's an obvious difference between shelling out $60 up-front or $5 a month or whatever and shelling out $0 (and then being tracked, or having your data harvested).

Especially in the modern ecosystem where costs have become divorced from income, people would (behavior observation strongly suggests) much rather pay with their information footprint (a resource they can't capitalize alone) than the dollars in their wallets. Otherwise... Where's the successful paid-for browser right now? Which one? Can we point to it?

But they aren't capitalizing their data, because they're paying more in the end. That's my point.

Let's say widgets are $x. Now the widget manufacturer, as their competitors are advertising, decides to advertise too. They just hit magazines. Success!

But then comes targeted advertising. Now they must pay for profiled advertising, which means that someone colllected the data, archived it, continues to track, and provides uptime and an api you can poll.

Google had 300 billion in gross revenue, what of facebook and others? And there are more nuanced, more targeted providers too.

The entire tracking industry has got to be hundreds of trillions in revenue, and guess where that comes from?

The cost of everything you buy.

So you get a browser and gmail for supposedly free, but now steak costs 3% more. What a savings.

And yes, when people are tricked into thinking a browser is free, it will be hard for visibly paid competitors.

People complain about global warming, and "how did we get here?". Well, the same way we have no paid for browsers. No one cares past their own nose.

If your argument is "Browsers are subsidized by advertising driving up the cost of goods," I don't think I disagree but I don't think the consequence of stopping that model is the cost of good goes down.

Advertising is driven by competition; in the absence of a browser-subsidy flow for that money, the ads will still be there and prices won't go down. The ads will flow through other channels. Then we get higher cost of goods and no zero-cost browser, which seems strictly worse?

If the cost goes up, then the cost will come down. It doesn't happen overnight, and yes a browser is a minimal part of the market.

However if everyone paid cash for browsers, browsers would also be quite cheap. If you sell 50M copies a year, even $1 goes a very long way.

Firefox seems to spend around $200M/year1 on 'software development', but they also have lots of side projects (pocket, proxies, other software like thunderbird, etc) so I bet $50M could easily fit the bill. And Firefox doesn't even use a shared render engine, or HTML/etc parsers, it's not a chromium based browser.

1. https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

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